


fragrant in small doses

by acequid



Category: BLACKPINK (Band)
Genre: F/F, Non-Linear Narrative, background jenlisa is cute and minor, chaesoo-centric, stream R for clear skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 04:08:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30032814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acequid/pseuds/acequid
Summary: Chaeyoung thinks being in love is probably a requirement for writing love songs.Or, at least, having been in love once.
Relationships: Jennie Kim/Lalisa Manoban | Lisa, Kim Jisoo/Park Chaeyoung | Rosé
Comments: 12
Kudos: 59





	fragrant in small doses

Chaeyoung arranges Jisoo’s fingers on the guitar fretboard, and that feels like the beginning.

Jisoo is hopeless, can only make discordant sounds that hurt her ears. That’s okay, though, because Chaeyoung can play well enough for the both of them. She sings softly with the string melody and Jisoo thinks about how, in a different context, a movie, maybe, this scene would be romantic.

Jisoo thinks about Chaeyoung making music, writing songs. Love songs, sung at night, or on a date beside the Han River. It’s a picnic, it’s someone’s anniversary.

(It’s their job to sing for others, and it suddenly occurs to Jisoo that she can’t remember the last time someone sang for her.)

Chaeyoung plays guitar beautifully. Chaeyoung is beautiful.

Jisoo wonders if she’s ever thought this before.

~

When she was younger, just a nobody in Melbourne, Roseanne would play games with her church friends. Squeaky bike races to the music stores to gawk at all the new album covers: Big Bang, Super Junior, 2PM. 

Shoving at the window: _Who’s your favorite?_ And, _No, he’s mine!_ And, _I’d move to Korea just to—_

Roseanne, slipping past, stopping tentatively in front of the wall of guitars in the back, impossibly tall. She runs her fingers over the gloss on an acoustic model, dares to pluck one string. 

It’s in her, the bug, the urge to perform. An itch in her stomach nothing else can scratch. She receives the guitar for her birthday and doesn’t let it go.

Later, when Rosanne boards the plane in Melbourne and Chaeyoung steps off in Seoul, she will clutch the handle on her guitar case with a white-knuckled grip. She can feel it starting.

Chaeyoung strums and sings in front of the panel of YG Entertainment judges, and that feels like a start. She stands at the back of the group of young, nervously shifting girls in the dance studio she will come to know like home, and that feels like a start, too.

A short, confident, older girl walks up to her with her palm outstretched and says _Kim Jisoo,_ and that feels like something else entirely.

~

It’s not that sharing a room with Chaeyoung is hard.

Quite the opposite, actually. It’s _easy._

Jisoo wakes up, and Chaeyoung is up. Jisoo goes to bed, and Chaeyoung is already sleeping. 

Occasionally in the mornings, Chaeyoung brings Jisoo breakfast. At night, Jisoo brings her tea. 

Jisoo never sets an alarm, because Chaeyoung always wakes her up if they have a schedule. Chaeyoung doesn’t need an alarm, because her body is set to what the world calls “a healthy sleep cycle,” and Jisoo calls, “freak time.”

Chaeyoung’s hair falls out a lot, the result of years of dyed and damaged roots. Jisoo will find long blonde hairs everywhere: her pillow, her clothes, her own head. Surprisingly, she doesn’t mind.

Jisoo plays games at night and Chaeyoung watches, sometimes, padding across the room to warm Jisoo’s duvet. Usually, she falls asleep there, bathed in the blue light of Jisoo’s phone, head on her shoulder.

Jisoo doesn’t mind this either.

~

Dieting is the worst, and not because of her own hunger. Jisoo thinks she could probably survive on rice and sunlight for like, ever.

No, dieting is the worst because when word trickles down through about seven layers of managers that they have a performance coming up, Chaeyoung shuts down. 

Not all at once; gradually, as the days crawl on and the gnawing pains start to hit all of them, Chaeyoung gets quieter and quieter.

Jisoo hates it.

“Chaeyoung-ah,” she says, the open bag of chips held out, “just have some.”

It’s the look in her eyes as she considers. Jisoo _hates_ it. 

First, temptation. _Maybe just one,_ Jisoo can see the words almost pass her lips. Then, rapidly: responsibility to the company, guilt for the thought in the first place, embarrassment at her own hunger, determination to stay strong.

“I shouldn’t,” is what Chaeyoung says instead, with a tight smile. 

Fake. _Fake._ Jisoo wants to wipe it off her face.

Lisa, sweeping through, snatching the bag out of Jisoo’s hand before she can react: “You’re skinny, Chaengie. Eat some snacks.” A crunch, to emphasize her point.

Even Jennie watches them from over the rim of a full-fat vanilla latte. 

Chaeyoung shakes her head, resolute, and leaves the kitchen instead.

Jisoo thinks about smuggling food and murdering managers.

~

Lisa and Chaeyoung are best friends, and Jisoo and Jennie are best friends, and Lisa and Jennie have always been something...more. And Jisoo sees this and knows what it means and doesn’t want Chaeyoung to feel neglected, so she tries a little harder. She plays pretend affection: part show to tease the others, part effort to strengthen her relationship with Chaeyoung. It’s funny and fun and light.

She learns Chaeyoung will blush at compliments, but cringe at aegyo. She prefers movies to dramas, but likes being outside over either. She cries easily but laughs easier, and believes anything anyone tells her.

Jisoo brings her a flower, and Chaeyoung presses it in a book. Jisoo buys her a guitar, and Chaeyoung physically can’t speak.

Jisoo plays pretend affection, and then one day she isn’t pretending anymore.

~

“What’s wrong?” Jisoo asks, because Lisa has been pacing up and down their living room for hours, sighing audibly and generally being mopey and dramatic, and Jisoo can only withstand so much.

Lisa emerges from the depths of her hoodie hood and casts a deeply miserable look to where Jisoo is (trying to) watch TV, and says, slowly, like the effort tires her:

“...What?”

Jisoo could smack her, really.

“I _said,_ is something wrong?”

This is a mistake, clearly, because Lisa takes it as an invitation to sprawl onto the couch next to her and occupy as much surface area as possible. “ _So_ many things wrong, unnie,” Lisa whines, and Jisoo reaches over to pack a pillow over the younger girl’s face.

It’s not like Jisoo doesn’t know what the matter is.

The matter: Jennie filming a CF in Japan.

(The other, smaller, secret matter: Chaeyoung in the recording studio. All day, every day. And maybe, Jisoo is maybe getting just a little tired of it.)

“It’s so boring here alone,” Lisa cries, violently shifting position and ending with her head dangling off the edge of the couch and her feet scuffing the wall. This is code for _I’m upset Jennie is gone,_ and, _I miss her,_ and, _Jisoo-unnie, you’re great, but you’re really not the person I want to see right now,_ and Jisoo knows this is the code because she speaks it right back.

“I’ll flip you if you don’t get your feet off the wall.” _(I’m sorry Jennie is in Japan. She’ll be back soon. Tell Chaeyoung to stop working so hard because she doesn’t listen to me and she comes home too late and she isn’t eating enough and she’s tired all the time and she—)_

Lisa sticks her tongue out. “Flip me, then.” _(I miss her a lot and it hurts, I think it isn’t supposed to hurt but it does, and I miss her, and I don’t know what to do.)_

Jisoo doesn't lift a finger, settles deeper into the cushions, makes a sort of scoffing sound, and turns the TV a fraction louder. “All the blood rushing to your head will make it explode,” she says, and there’s no malice in it.

_We’re pretty pathetic, aren’t we?_

_Yeah._

~

Chaeyoung thinks being in love is probably a requirement for writing love songs. 

Or, at least, having been in love once. 

And she has no regrets about anything in her life until she sits down in a practice room with a pen in hand and tries to write, only to find that in the past ten years of training and schedules and performing, she’s never found time to meet a boy. So she caps the pen, and she uncaps the pen, and she tries to invent the feeling of love. 

She watches movies. She reads books. She reads poems. She watches couples outside the window and it’s so close she can feel it. She can see the shape of it, in flowers exchanged, in smiles hidden, hands clasped, words repeated, a billion different stories and none of them hers. Love is everywhere but in her brain, in her fingers, on her tongue.

She thinks about it so much the word turns foreign in her mind, meaningless. She traces the letters over and over at the top of the page, the only scrawl on the field of white. The light overhead is dim, but bright enough to see how bad she’s failing. _Love. Sarang._ The paper rips and ink bleeds through onto the table.

Chaeyoung is a songwriter – or at least, she wants to be – and she doesn’t want to fake it. Sometimes, she thinks about how easy it would be: take all the words she’s found through study, rearrange them, spruce them up and make them pretty and set to music, _debut._

Debut. Solo debut, isn’t that what she’s always wanted? Quoted lines bubble up in her throat. Bitter, artificial, but god, would it be so easy.

Then: Lisa will take Jennie’s hand under the dinner table. Or, Jennie will rest her head on Lisa’s shoulder after practice. They’ll smile together, quietly (and when has Lisa _ever_ been quiet), and giggle about something no one else can understand – could possibly understand, when it’s a secret for just the two of them.

Everything Chaeyoung has memorized falls away. 

She is a songwriter, and she doesn’t want to fake it.

~

It’s Bangkok.

Or, Amsterdam, maybe. Paris, or back home in Melbourne. Chaeyoung knows there’s a stage and an audience, for sure.

(It’s Inkigayo, 2016.)

There’s a song — several songs? — she can’t remember which. It’s not like they have that many to begin with.

(Osaka? Fukuoka?)

It’s the four of them against the world, riding the high of the crowd. It’s hot, and the crowd roars, and confetti snows down, they’re breathing it in, and Chaeyoung doesn’t think it’s possible to come down from this, and it’s enough. It’s enough. 

She doesn’t need anything else. Not when Jennie is beaming and waving like nothing sharp has ever pierced her armor, not when Lisa is jumping and dancing and laughing loud enough to be heard across the stage without a mic, not when Jisoo, Jisoo—

(Gayo Daejun, 2018.)

Jisoo.

It looks like this: Jisoo, confetti in her hair — tall on heels, glittering dress — Jisoo, hands outstretched, catching paper, flowers, plushies from the fans— smirking for the picture — pose, peace sign, finger heart, pose — eyes shining, Chaeyoung has never seen that, someone’s eyes actually _shine,_ it’s something that happens in fiction, in songs —

(Seoul. It’s Seoul, in the end.)

Jisoo catches Chaeyoung’s eye from across the stage and winks, or rather, _attempts_ a wink and blinks clumsily with both eyes instead, an action caught by the cameras and mirrored in gigantic high-definition for the whole stadium; the crowd erupts into a frenzy and Chaeyoung hears none of it. Jisoo scrunches her nose and blows an air kiss instead and Chaeyoung finds herself laughing, expelling the butterflies beating against her rib cage, reaching out, snatching up the kiss and putting it in her pocket.

_(Mine.)_

She puts the mic to her lips and starts the post-performance speech and pretends a single thought isn’t winding like a ticker tape headline around and around her brain.

Jisoo is beautiful. Jisoo is _beautiful._

Chaeyoung wonders if she’s ever thought this before.

**Author's Note:**

> soloist rosie is my religion
> 
> rpf disclaimer: hope you’ve enjoyed this work of fictional fiction :) all the love and respect in the world to the pinks, this story will stay up as long as it makes no one uncomfy <3


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